UDMC and Avatars

I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to present at the University of Dallas Ministry Conference on Oct. 25th. I was a part of two very different presentations- one tech, one not. The non-tech presentation was done with my very dear friend and colleague, Beth Belcher. Beth and I spent nine years encouraging children to have reverence and familiarity with Church devotions and Mass. If you might be here and looking for "The Catholic School Mass- Better and Better" there is a QR code to the right. If you scan it or click it you will find the shared Google folder. If there is an error please be sure to let me know. You can also find Beth's site in my Blog list.

The other presentation I was involved with another dear friend and my "partner in crime" Carol Mayo,  was "Encouraging Writing with Weebly". A great session but our tech was less than desirable. It was pretty sad. The laptop we had access to was XP, no flash installed, not hard wired to the internet, Office not registered and who knows what else. My mac and the projector wouldn't talk to one another so we were left with static images (and not enough of those!) and our enthusiastic speech. Despite the tech glitches we had a nice sized group that stayed, asked good questions, and were most kind about our tech problems which we had absolutely no control over. I thought it still went well. It was just so disappointing to not be able to demonstrate how easy Weebly is to use. You can find some of the information we use to present Weebly by following this link.

I think I mentioned before about my elective at school where I introduce some fun tech for my class. I am always looking for things that don't  require you to create an account and you don't see a gallery of inappropriate items. I have found my students love to create things online. Recently I showed them two different sites for creating "avatars". They had a lot of fun with them. The first is DoppleMe . You can make a fun avatar for free. To save it you would need an account but we just snipped it and saved it.

The other site I showed them was Build Your Wild Self. I was afraid they would think this site was more for little kids but they spent more time here than the other. This site comes from the New York Zoos and Aquarium so you can imagine that it is very kid friendly. Again free. You start with creating a "normal" looking avatar and then begin to add animal parts. When you complete your new wild self it gives you a name based on the parts you chose. It also explains what each part is, from what animal and some information about it. (When I created this one what I clicked on was not what I was getting so I don't know about the glitch.) You can send to a friend or snip it and save or print it out. I really enjoy this site also.

"After" the animal parts!

My normal avatar before the animal parts.

TCEA 2013 , 360 Cities and iBooks Author

I am back from a great week spent in Austin for the TCEA conference. So many wonderful sessions. My brain is still jumbled and I will need to sort through my notes of links and things. I also had the pleasure of presenting three sessions with my partner in crime, Carol Mayo, the director of professional development for the diocese. On Monday, we presented Websites with Weebly. Full session and lots of great comments afterwards. Likewise for our Tuesday session of Award Winning Websites with Animoto. And finally, a small but very enthusiastic crowd for our Paper Slide and Mime Videos. All of our session material can be found on Carol's website, Hold the Mayo (cute name isn't it? A nice play on words with her name!). If you are interested, please take a look. There are even some of the completed projects from the attendees. Among the links posted is a link to our STARCamp wikispace. This is a teacher tech camp that we have taught for a few years. Carol also does lots of other trainings and her resources can be found within the site.

I think one of the things I most benefited from this year at TCEA were the sessions on working with iBooks Author with Alexis Carroll Cline, the publications specialist at TCEA. (You can follow her twitter feed here) I had played with iBooks Author before but I feel I have a much better grasp of how to work with it now.

Another favorite session was Digital Field Trips with Naomi Thompson from the Fort Worth ISD. She shared some links I don't remember seeing before. I was really intriguied by 360cities.net. There are so many places from around the world to visit. Perhaps you would like to show your students the Colosseum in Rome up close (be sure to follow the arrows to look inside), or the magnificent Machu Picchu, or maybe a peek inside the Louvre in Paris? I could spend many hours just perusing all of the listings in this site. 360cities.net can be used in any subject, visiting a battlefield, home of an author, or the interior of a cathedral. 360 can take your students on that field trip some may never take.

Many of the presenters had handouts for their presentations which can be found here. Check out the list, there may be something here that interests you.

All in all, it was a very good week. I will try to post more of what I learned in the coming weeks. So much to digest. This coming week is a trip to San Antonio for the TMEA/TI:ME conference. More learning!

Weebly

I was first introduced to Weebly a few years ago while I was working on my master's degree. I didn't see anything special and to be honest with you, I really didn't spend much time with it. I have since rediscovered Weebly and am thoroughly impressed with the updates and features.
Here is a link to a site I made just playing with some of the things available: Adventures with Rose

One of the nicest things about working with Weebly is the ease of adding elements. A simple drag and drop adds an element and the directions to upload pictures or add text is very easy to do. I did not find changing, adding, rearranging elements to be frustrating at all. With the free account, you do have some limitations and this is the one thing that does frustrate me. For instance, you are not able to upload videos. Now you can link or embed them if they are hosted on YouTube, TeacherTube or Vimeo. All fine and good, but I really wish you could upload even short videos without upgrading to the Pro account. I guess that is one of the trade offs you make for all the other really cool things about it. Audio is also only under the Pro account.

Getting a Pro account is pretty easy though and if you can get 5 teachers to sign up using your reference code you are upgraded to Pro for free. Not a bad deal and actually the price for the Pro is very reasonable. Now why go to Pro? Well you get more student accounts. And this is where Weebly really has a nice advantage over other websites. You can created classes and each student can create their own website. You can make the class sites public or private that can only be accessed with a password. What a great place for your students to publish their writings or create a digital portfolio. But you also don't have to worry about strangers lurking about your classes websites. No email address is needed for the student accounts. If your students are under 13 you do need to get parent permission to use the site. There are many sample blogging parent consent letters out on the web, so look around and adapt one for your situation. And hey, if you now think you want to try it, and you are feeling generous, why not use this link and help me get that Pro account? http://education.weebly.com/referral.php?oTOXFMo3ZIAb897n

So will I switch and use Weebly with my students? I will probably try this with at least one class. I am moving to a new school and they will be BYOD in the coming school year. This could be just the thing to make my class ROCK!